This week we turn our attention to the screen on the left and the items it holds—Dashboard.

“Wait, screen on the left? What are you talking about?” I hear you silently demanding.

In the early days of Mac 101, I explained the purpose of the Mission Control application. By way of refresher, with Mission Control you can create separate desktop environments (or spaces)—one that displays open Mail, Contacts, and Calendar applications; another for Safari; and yet another for iPhoto and iMovie. By default, Dashboard occupies the first Mission Control space.

There are various ways to expose the Dashboard screen. If you have a Mac with a trackpad, just swipe three fingers to the right to expose it (or to the left if you’ve switched off natural scrolling in the Trackpad system preference). Alternatively, you can press the F12 key (in conjunction with the fn key, if your keyboard has such a thing); double-click the Dashboard application in the Applications folder at the root level of your hard drive; or press Command-Space to expose the Spotlight search field, enter Dashboard, and press Return.

Wuzzup with widgets

Now that I’ve told you how to find the Dashboard screen, perhaps I should mention its purpose.

There are times when you want to swiftly check a bit of information or perform a relatively minor task. For example, you might wish to look at the current price of your soon-to-be-least-productive stock, or check the weather, or run a quick calculation. You could launch an application or your Web browser to do these things, but wouldn’t it be easier if you could flip to a screen and find just the tool you need for the job?

Of course it would, and that’s the point of Dashboard. It’s a place where Apple stores small applications called widgets that you use for these kinds of everyday tasks.

The Dashboard screen

By default, the Dashboard screen includes four widgets: Calculator, Weather, Calendar, and Clock. You can click and drag these widgets to any location you like.

Many widgets have a hidden talent. For example, if you click the portion of the Calendar widget that displays today’s date, a sidebar appears that lists upcoming events. Hover your cursor over the Clock widget, click the small i (for Info) that appears in the bottom-right corner, and you can choose a region and city for the clock to display. (Click Done to flip the widget back around.) Perform this same hover maneuver over the Weather widget, click the i button, and you can track a different city’s weather, choose to display temperatures in Fahrenheit or Celsius scale, and opt to show low temperatures as well as highs in the six-day forecast. When you click on the Calculator widget, you can perform calculations not only with its on-screen buttons, but also with the number keys on your Mac’s keyboard.

These may look strangely familiar to some of you. And they should. Many of the default apps found on iOS devices look and perform similarly.

Adding and removing widgets

Helpful though the default set of widgets is, it’s a fairly meager collection. Thankfully you can add more. To do so, first click the Plus (+) button in the Dashboard screen’s bottom-left corner to switch to the Add Widgets screen. When you do this, a larger collection of widgets appears, including Ski Report, Contacts, Dictionary, ESPN, Flight Tracker, Movies, Stickies, Stocks, Tile Game, Translation, Unit Converter, and Web Clip (a kind of widget that I’ll explore more fully later in the lesson). To add a widget to the Dashboard screen just click it.

Add more Apple-bundled widgets via the Add Widgets screen.

Many of these widgets, like the default set, are configurable. Hover your cursor over them and look for the small i in the bottom-right corner. For example, when you click the Info button in the Stocks widget, you can add the symbols of Dow Jones and NASDAQ stocks that you’d like to track, simply by entering a company name in the Search field and clicking the Plus (+) button. Any stocks that match that name will appear in a menu. Click the one you want, and it will be added to the widget.

Configuring the Stocks widget.

If you’d like to remove a widget you have two ways to go about it. The first is to click the minus (–) button on the bottom-left of the screen. Do this and X’s appear in the top-left corner of each widget. Click the X on each widget you wish to remove from the screen. This procedure does not remove the unwanted widgets from your Mac completely. They’re still available when you click the Plus button I mentioned earlier.

The other method is to hold down the Option key and hover your cursor over the widget you’d like to delete. The X will appear over just that widget. Click the X, and the widget is gone.